Letter

Healthier than you might think

Dear healthmatters — While I enjoyed Steve Iliffe’s colourful summary of the healthy living centre programme (issue 38), it is regrettable that such emotive and harmful language was used to criticise this potentially valuable initiative. His conclusions are unbalanced and seem to represent socialist frustration at the lack of wealth redistribution by the current government.

Having worked for the past 18 months in a community seeking funding for a HLC, I am confident that Iliffe’s conclusions are incorrect. Our community suffers marked social and material deprivation, and the constituents may well lose up to five years of life compared to those in more prosperous areas in Wales.

Iliffe makes a substantial error in assuming that support for HLCs comes mainly from those who will never use them. To achieve funding, a HLC proposal needs to ‘be about what your community wants and respond to what your community needs’. Our proposal has developed from a detailed assessment of individual and community needs, and is enthusiastically supported by the community.

Iliffe suggests HLCs are something of an unworthy second class provision, ‘defined…by relative poverty’ and a cheap method of covering up a problem that exceeds the determination and will of a centrist government. The reality, however, is that

• The HLC initiative is one of a broad range of initiatives attempting to address many of the problems of these communities.
• HLCs provide a far wider opportunity than improved health and social care provision.
• Although targeted at relative poverty, the initiative will be valuable to all citizens.
• Wealth redistribution of the scale called for by Iliffe is both unachievable and unworkable. What is needed is a redistribution of opportunity and improved skills within poor communities.
• Increasingly, we believe that reduced social capital (that is features of social cohesion, organisation and support networks) is responsible for a significant proportion of health inequality. HLCs can be specifically address such problems.
• New Opportunities Fund initiatives should not be seen as a type of alms-giving charity for the poor. Many currently deprived communities were once the wealth creating base of the UK economy and have a right to receive the support and assistance that should be available to all.

All those interested in the wellbeing of deprived communities should welcome HLCs. We should put ideology and political dogma aside and adopt a pragmatic attitude in accepting the opportunities that come from a government tackling social exclusion and inequity as a priority. HLCs will not solve the problems of our society (nothing in isolation will) but they are a valuable weapon against inequity.